August 28, 2008

UC Guy #2 Reporting for Duty

I certainly have less technical depth when it comes to infrastructure technology than UC Guy #1 -- so don't ask me those tough design or configuration questions :-)

However, I am technical. My original background and interest in technology stems from development* -- I started a long time ago writing video games for the Commodore Vic-20 and C64.

Today I spend most of my time focusing on business strategy: figuring out how UC (and Collaboration) can provide real measurable business benefits.

On this blog I will try focus on two main areas:

1. How UC can be used to improve business.

I will try to highlight both successes and failures and I will work hard to separate the reality from the marketing hype.

2. How UC applications can be extended to support business.

This is my developer background coming to the surface. While many tools provide great "out of the box" functionality, I am interested in taking a look at special customizations that can increase the value of the new UC tools.

This will likely involve a look at communication enabled business applications and some of the APIs that can be used to extend the current UC applicatons (for example the various Microsoft OCS APIs). I might even try to work in an instant-messaging based game. (I still love games.)

Of course I will be looking for your feedback as well. People seem to forget that while UC has been talked about for a very long time, in reality much of this UC technology is really very new. As such, we need to gather all of our collective experience to help move things along. (For example, I had the opportunity to lead the first Canadian customer integration of Microsoft OCS and a Nortel CS1000 pbx in May of this year. The way the marketing departments talk you would have thought there were thousands of these deployments already!)

And, if you are passionate about Unified Communications then please drop us a line. We are always looking for another "UC Guy" (in this context "guy" = either a male or female; we would be happy to welcome any "UC Gals" out there!)